Strange Attractor

Episode 31: The universe is made of dander


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What's outside our solar system?
  • Where does the solar system end? (ABC, Australia)
  • Where in the universe is Voyager? The surprising showdown over where our solar system ends (TIME)
  • What defines the boundary of the solar system? (NASA)
  • Live tracking: Where are the Voyager probes now? (NASA)
  • Voyager 1 is travelling at ~17 km/second (Wikipedia)
  • It's believed that Voyager 1 is either in interstellar space or pretty close to it (the heliopause) - that's the furthest we've sent anything (Wikipedia)
  • In about 30,000 years, Voyager 1 will have passed through the Oort Cloud & in 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445 (Wikipedia)
  • The infamous 'pale blue dot': Earth as seen by Voyager 1 from 6 billion km (Wikipedia)
  • What is the heliopause? (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
  • What is the heliopause? (Southwest Research Institute)
  • The heliosphere: A proper sciencey paper (Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie)
  • What is the Kuiper Belt? A belt of icy bodies beyond Neptune (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
  • What is the Oort Cloud? A hypothesised belt of icy bodies in the far reaches of the solar system (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
  • Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft flight paths (The Planets Today, Vimeo)
  • Could the Voyager, Pioneer & New Horizons probes eventually be caught by the gravity of another star & start orbiting that star? (Quora)
  • What is a galaxy? (NASA)
  • Galaxies & how they're formed (NASA)
  • The Milky Way galaxy (NASA)
  • Hubble’s high-definition panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy (NASA)
  • All about the Andromeda galaxy (EarthSky)
  • Elliptical galaxy facts & definition (Space.com)
  • Spiral galaxy facts & definition (Space.com)
  • Estimates on how many solar systems & galaxies there might be in the universe (University of Cambridge)
  • How many solar systems are in our galaxy? (NASA)
  • Do all stars have solar systems? (Dept. of Physics, University of Illinois)
  • How did our solar system form? (HubbleSite)
  • Are we really all made of stardust? Yep (Phys.org)
  • How are stars formed? (Science, How Stuff Works)
  • Population I stars (younger) tend to be in the discs of spiral galaxies & made of heavier elements (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
  • Population II stars (older) tend to be in globular clusters & the nucleus of galaxies & made of lighter elements (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
  • Main sequence stars on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Hyperphysics, Georgia State University)
  • Interactive Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Las Cumbres Observatory)
  • Black holes come in 3 varieties: Stellar, supermassive & intermediate (Space.com)
  • Into a black hole: A lecture transcript from Prof. Hawking (Stephen Hawking)
  • Journey into a black hole (HubbleSite)
  • The escape velocity for Earth is ~25,000 miles/hour or 40,000 km/hour (Wolfram Alpha)
  • A list of escape velocities for the planets, moons, sun & solar system (Wikipedia)
  • A list of the gravity values for all the planets compared with Earth (NASA)
  • Definition of massive: "Having relatively high mass" (The Free Dictionary)
  • How do black holes work? (Science, How Stuff Works)
  • Black hole jets can influence star formation in galaxies by dispersing & heating interstellar gas (Phys.org)
  • What happens when 2 black holes collide? You get gravitational waves like the one LIGO detected in 2015 (LIGO)
  • Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system (Space.com)
  • How long does it take for a star to ignite at birth? Not long, but the first photons of light may not escape for thousands of years (Reddit)
  • First sun, then planets: The formation & evolution of the solar system (Wikipedia)
  • Solar system formation (Windows 2 the Universe)
  • What's the difference between comets & asteroids? (EarthSky)
  • What is an orbit? (NASA)
  • A list of solar system objects by orbit (Wikipedia)
  • There are >8,000 artifical objects orbiting Earth (National Geographic)
  • How can one say that gravity is a very weak force, when all the planets & stars are rotating around due to gravity only? (Quora)
  • How can galaxies collide if the universe is expanding? (ABC, Australia)
  • What is a galaxy cluster? A group of hundreds to thousands of galaxies, believed to be the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the universe (Wikipedia)
  • What fuel does Voyager 1 use? (Slate)
  • Live tracking: Where is Halley's comet now? (The Sky Live)
  • What is Halley's comet (& its tail) made of? (Wikipedia)
  • Halley's comet completes an elliptical orbit around the sun every ~76 years (Wikipedia)
  • The difference between meteoroids, meteors & meteorites (Meteorites Australia)
  • What causes a shooting star? (Wonderopolis)
  • How do you shield astronauts & satellites from deadly micrometeorites? (Smithsonian)
  • How does the space station avoid meteors? (Reddit)

  • Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia

  • Corrections
    • Johnny meant 'elliptical' galaxies, not globular (Cosmos, Swinburne University)
    • A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core as a satellite (Wikipedia)
    • To go into orbit, a body must still reach escape velocity, but it must be directed away from a planet & then it follows a curved path (Wikipedia)
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